Language policy and terminology in South Africa

This chapter describes the development of the language policy programme of postapartheid South Africa. It highlights both the place of terminology in this policy programme and some of its achievements. As the fortunes of terminology are inevitably bound up with the fate of the policy on multilingualism, the chapter draws attention to difficulties that have arisen in the course of implementing the policy and suggests three sociolinguistic paradigms that offer explanatory frameworks for these challenges. It concludes by describing on-going terminology initiatives at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) that attempt to respond to some of the implications of the sociolinguistic paradigms.